Counting by 20s in French, the Bible, and the Gettysburg Address

Of course I grant Lincoln the right to poetic license in saying “four score and seven” instead of “eighty-seven.” But I wonder how on earth the idea came to him. I would no more even think of saying “four score and seven” than I would “seven dozen and three.”

When I was first learning French I was amazed to learn that the French actually count this way (between 80 and 99). Eighty-seven is “quartre-vingt-sept.” (This is standard Parisian French; in some dialects, eighty is “huitante” or “octante”.) There is no other language I know of that normally counts this way: not Spanish, not Latin, not German and not Icelandic.

But then I remembered that the King James Bible counted this way. It seems that “threescore” and “fourscore” on the one hand and “sixty” and “eighty” on the other existed side-by-side in the language for a long time. (“Sixty” and “eighty” date all the way back to Old English.) Was there any rhyme or reason as to which form to use? And why did “threescore” and “fourscore” essentially die out?

Was this still a common way of counting in English in Lincoln’s boyhood? Or was he using a Gallicism? Or was he copying the tone of the King James Bible?

I’m sure that Lincoln was echoing, if only subconciously, the King James Version. It has just the right sort of portentous ring to it. The phrase also scans better.

IIRC, the Celts and the Burushaski (of India) had vigesimal counting systems.

Many times, in the original Hebrew, the bible will say XXX hundreds and XXX (tens) and XXX (ones). Or it many even reverse it XXX (ones) and XXX (tens).

Zev Steinhardt

You mean like “four and twenty” instead of 24?

I, too, have found it weird that you have to say “four times twenty plus nineteen” in order to communicate “99” in French. Still, every language has some oddities in the counting, even English; the words “eleven” and “twelve” are bastardized adoptions of, as I recall, some old Slavic language’s terms for “one left” and “two left”.

Japanese has an oddity that’s kinda awkward for English speakers: there is a separate word that means “ten thousands”. So, to express “two million” in Japanese, in essence you say “two hundred ten-thousands”. Takes some getting used to.

Max Torque:

I’ve heard it only slightly differently – that eleven and twelve come from “ein lifon” and “twe lif(on)” = “one over” and “two over” , obviously meaning one and two more than ten.

Scratch nailed it by citing the Celts’ number system. The favorite theory among linguists is that the French use of quatre-vingt is a survival of the ancient Gauls’ habit of counting by twenties.

Now, how that got into the KJV, I’m not sure, unless it was a similar holdover from the ancient Celtic Brythons (most unlikely) or an import from medieval French following the Norman period (more likely).

I agree with APB that Lincoln adopted the KJV style simply because it offered more sonorous grandeur for making a solemn speech. On the early American frontier where Ol’ Abe grew up, the KJV was often the only reading matter in those log cabins. (Sidetrack: how much more eloquent in their use of the beauty of the English language, those early Americans raised on the KJV who never went to school a day in their lives, compared to modern Ph.D.s whose language is trite and expressionless.)

Max, the Japanese use of “ten thousand” is a borrowing from the Chinese, I believe. Hindustani has a similar practice, except that they use a special word for ‘hundred thousand’: lakh (from Sanskrit lakSa). Indians count like this even when speaking English, so one of the characteristics of Indian English is to say “ten lakh” instead of “million”. The next higher levels in the number system after that go by every two power of ten, instead of by threes. Thus the number 123,456,789 instead of being read “a hundred and twenty-three million, four hundred fifty-six thousand,” etc., would be read in Indian English as 12,34,56,789 “twelve crore, thirty-four lakh, fifty-six thousand,” etc. They put the commas every two places.

No one has mentioned that score originally meant a cut or scratch made on a tally-stick of wood, a tablet of clay, or the like, in order to keep a record. Twenty was marked by a longer scratch; hence the development of a score to mean twenty.

According to Jan Gullburg’s Mathematics from the Birth of Numbers, ‘counting in terms of twenties was in general use in most English-speaking countries until several generations ago’, although he credits Lincoln’s usage as a old-time borrowing creating an air of solemnity among his listeners.

Another remnant of vigesimal counting in Old French is found in the name of a Paris hospital built in the 13th century to accommodate 300 blind people, which is still called the Hôpital des Quinze-Vingts, that is, the Hospital of the Fifteen Score.

The ancient Greek “myriad” meant ten thousand, even though English speakers today use it to mean just some unspecified huge value.

Another similar occurence not related to the 20=score concept; the other “weird” French number is soixante-dix (70), which is “sixty and ten”.

Also, this isn’t just Parisian French, it is proper French. The use of septante, huitante (octante) and neuftante is strictly dialectical, and is (to my knowledge) a European thing…I knew an Austrian and Swiss who used them fairly often. These terms are not used in Québec, and not likely in many other French regions, IMO.

FTR, German does use the “one-and-, two-and-” system. einundzwantzen (I know that’s spelled wrong…I haven’t taken any German in over 7 years…). And to make things more complicated to read, when large numbers are actaully writen out, there are no spaces…everything is joined together as one word. Which is why, I think, that the convention is to write any large numbers numerically!

Einundzwanzig (21)… darfst trinken!

Another twenty oddity:

In the Chukchi language of northeasternmost Siberia, the word for ‘man’ is the same as the word for ‘twenty’: the sum of a man’s fingers and toes.

Mnemosyne: I don’t know which novel it is, but H.G. Wells used “four and twenty” constructions. So it’s just not German. Dutch works the same as German. (Sequence and sticking all the words together.) Norwegian has both systems: en-og-tyve (one and twenty) and tjue-en (twenty-one) [hyphens are mine]. The former is kind of old-fashioned, and fasing out.

IIRC, Danish has some old forms for 60 and 80: treds and fjerds (sp?). Obviously third (20-fold) and fourth (20-fold). I think they even have “halvtreds” which stands for 70 (halfway past the third 20-fold or something).
Spiny Norman (or any of his compatriots), where are you?

If you think those are bizarre, look at the Danish numbers for 10, 20, etc.; I think the word for “60” in Danish is halvfjerds.
Spanish seems to have only three irregular numbers:
500=quinientos (5=cinco) (400=cuatrocientos)
700=setecientos (7=siete)
900=novecientos (9=nueve)
Russian regularly adds -dtsat’ as a tens suffix: 20=dvadtsat’; 30=tridtsat’, etc. But 40=sorok. 90= dievjanosto.

Exactly.

[ul]
[li]Genesis 5:6 And Seth lived five years and a hundred years…[/li]
[li]Genesis 5:19 And Jared lived two and sixty years…[/li][li]Genesis 5:21 And Enoch lived five and sixty years…[/li][li]Genesis 11:12 And Arpachshad lived five and thirty years…[/li][li]Genesis 47:28 …the years of his life were seven years and forty and a hundred years.[/li][li]Exodus 6:20 …And the years of Amram’s life were seven and thirty and a hundred years.[/li][/ul]
On the other hand, you also have:
[ul]
[li]Genesis 17:24 And Abraham was ninety and nine years old…[/li][li]Ezra 2 has a long list of the families that returned from exile with each family’s population. All the numbers in this chapter are in the correct sequence (thousands, hundreds, tens, ones).[/li]
[/ul]

And sometimes, the order is mixed up totally
[ul]
[li]Exodus 38:25 One thousand, seven hundred and five and seventy.[/li][li]Numbers 31:38 Six hundred, five and seventy.[/li][/ul]

The point being, that the Bible (in the original Hebrew, anyway) uses any of these numbering styles. In addition, I’m sure there are probably some that I missed as well.

Zev Steinhardt